


You should have lied

by katiebuttercup



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 8x4, Based on Gwendoline saying Brienne was finally selfish and took something for herself, Extended goodbye, F/M, Hurt feelings, I made the scene worse guys I’m sorry, the last of the starks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 01:50:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18768733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katiebuttercup/pseuds/katiebuttercup
Summary: Is this what you were planning all along?





	1. Chapter 1

“Is this what you planned all along?” Brienne asks, voice choked in her throat, “were you always going to go back to her?”

“Brienne...” and that’s all the answer she needs.

The edges of her lips pull in misery, “why go to bed with me then?” She demands, “if you were just going—if she is the one you wanted then why-“ her noble voice cracks and it breaks what little of his heart is left.

“She is hateful and so am I,”

Brienne swipes at the wetness on her cheeks, hates the slippery slide of tears, hates that she is helpless to do anything but cry. Hates that he’s made her this weak and vulnerable thing when once he had made her a knight. 

“I wish that you had stayed at that table with your brother and Pod, I wish you had never come to my door and made love to me“ 

“You don’t mean that!” He reaches for her but she brushes him away. 

They stare like hurt children across acres of pain. 

“Cercei is what I deserve,” Jaime says at last. He says it like it’s a fact. A door slamming in her face like all the others in her life. Left behind because she wasn’t enough. 

She watches him leave, wondering how she could be so stupid, how she could think that this happiness could have been hers, that he could have been hers. 

Brienne has given her life to service of one kind or another and just once she’d reached out, wanted something other than duty and loyalty and had been slapped in the face. 

It was worse than being the ugliest girl in the world. She draws her heavy cloak around herself, reaches inside for the knight, reaches for Sansa’s protector and squashes any womanly fit of emotion. She was not made for love, she was a sword and a shield and she would do her duty. There was nothing left. Jaime has made his choice and now it was her turn. 

There was a war coming and she would be ready.


	2. Chapter 2

Brienne gets up the next morning because there’s nothing else she can do. War wouldn’t wait for her broken heart to heal and she had to prepare. Jaime knew far too many of their secrets and if he was going back to Cercei there was every chance he would tell her them. 

She feels everyone’s eyes on her as she strides to her meeting with Sansa. She keeps her head up and shoulders back like a knight, like a soldier. Let them gossip behind their hands like they knew what happened. She wasn’t giving them any more fodder. 

When it is just them Sansa says “if you wish it I will give you Jaime Lannister’s head on a pike. Arya is on her way to Kings landing I’m sure she would oblige.”

It is only the faint turn up of sansa’s lips that tell Brienne she is mostly joking. 

“It’s fine,” Brienne says and tries to mean it. She’s been in battle before, faced dying and injury and unmitigated disaster. She could face this. 

“It is not!” Sansa says fiercely, “it is lucky that he fled in the night or else...”

“It would not have helped,” Brienne says, because it wouldn’t. She looks at Sansa, beautiful and pale, and wonders if she looked like Sansa the choice Jaime would have made would have been harder to make. If he would have stayed. It’s a pointless question, Sansa could not help being beautiful just a she couldn’t help being ugly and ugly things had certainly happened to Sansa. 

She wondered if people thought that Jaime and Cercei were a better match, incestous as it was, it made a terrible kind of sense. Much more than the golden lion and Brienne the beauty ever did. She hopes it gives him comfort, cercei’s beauty, helped him live with himself. 

She also wonders why he came to her room that night, why he had made love to her, had he really cared or had he simply been driven by male ego, did he want her or did he just want to keep Tormund in second place? He didn’t want her, he just didn’t want anyone else to have her either. 

Did he think of Cercei when they were together? Did he make comparisons and wish it were her? Had he been simply biding his time till he could return to his true North Star 

“I have found the best revenge is living,” Sansa says, “and thriving. And we will thrive and prevail ser Brienne. I promise.”

And somehow Brienne believes her. It helps.


	3. Chapter 3

He rides hard, as if he can outrun the look on Brienne’s face, the catch in her voice. 

But he’s never left Cersei, not for long and not to face the odds she faces now. He’s a puppet on a string and he can feel it tugging, tugging him down that dark, slippery road of power and passion. It’s hollow but satisfactory, a known quantity. Brienne was anything but, she continually challenged him, always constant but never staid or boring no matter what he had said.

He couldn’t not love Cersei, being with Brienne had been the closest he had come to even contemplating leaving Cersei, of making love to another woman. Perhaps it was because Brienne was so different, had he bedded a beautiful woman like Dany or Sansa he would not have been able to do it, he saw Cersei in every beautiful woman. 

But Brienne wasn’t beautiful at least not in that way, not in the shallow, outward way. Brienne’s beauty was her heart, her big eyes, her hands so big and yet so gentle. Cersei’s tiny, delicate hands had been talons in his heart. 

Cersei used her beauty as a weapon disguised as a rose and Brienne, Brienne who was built for battle was as gentle as a lamb. 

‘I’m happy you’re happy,” Tyrion had said, and he had meant it. And he had been happy. It just wasn’t enough. That was the kicker. Brienne hadn’t been enough, her love hadn’t been enough. 

He was hateful, to throw over a woman like Brienne, to knowingly drink the poison that was Cersei. He was hateful and he deserved nothing more than the best case scenario; to die with Cersei either by each other’s hand or by Dany. 

He only hoped he’d done enough to kill Brienne’s love for him; to set her free. That was his only wish, that Brienne not be ensnarled in this web any more than she had to be. 

But right now he had to bury her, bury Brienne deep so that Cersei never knew how close they had become, to keep Cersei’s talons out of the noblest person he had ever met. 

He would die before he would let Cersei anywhere near Brienne. 

It was the last noble thing he could do.


End file.
